Blue Screen
by deaka
Summary: Callista/Luke, extremely angsty. This is not the way happily ever after is supposed to go.


**Title:** blue screen (bsod)  
><strong>Pairing:<strong> Callista/Luke**  
>Setting: <strong>Between _Children of the Jedi_ and _Darksaber_**  
>Warnings:<strong> Angst, allusions to self-harm/suicidal ideation**  
>Disclaimer: <strong>I borrow. Characters belong to Lucasfilm, Del Ray, etc.****

**Summary:** This is not the way happily ever after is supposed to go. 

* * *

><p>Sparks filter through the darkness, and Callista sees not shadowed trees dripping rain but a matrix in the dark, one filled with chemical compositions and light filtration and discrete units that spell nothing as a whole. She dreams in code, these nights, phrases forming synapses and binary numbers forming blood.<p>

Walking through the forest is supposed to be a way to escape, but it is ineffective. What she runs from is not outside but within.

Cray, the woman whose body she wears, was a light sleeper. Cray liked the taste of albresian berries. Cray favoured her left hand, but sighted with her right eye, so her right hand is dominant with weapons. Cray broke her leg as a child and the blooming red flowers of the tree vines in the east made her nose itch. Cray frowned while she wrote, had double-jointed fingers and weak nails, and favoured touch to throat and the stomach and inside the wrist in the midst of intimacy.

Cray made a droid of the man she had loved and tried to love it the same.

Cray was human. Callista is not. Cannot be.

Luke sleeps as she left him an hour ago, pale in the moonlit mundanity. His face is rendered a mask to her eyes at times, less a thing that reveals a person than a collection of markers and points. Some of the points match Senator Padmé Amidala. Some of them match Anakin Skywalker. Seen in components, individually, it's possible to render him a stranger. She has to remind herself to be human, look through the stolen eyes she wears to put the face back together and draw meaning from its small tics.

She tries to recall how he appeared through sensors, that medley of body heat and infrared and movement and grainy image via which she first perceived him. It moved around the ship like an insect, that imprint, tramping the internal map of her awareness, touching her bulkheads and leaving wet stains of blood and sweat and effort. His voice binary numbers, compressed signals of recorded amplitude, he'd spoken to her. There had been truth there, fidelity of sound. She misses it. She misses him, that blip on her senses, bits forming pixels forming a shape, limping through her corridors.

That Force presence had been like star gone nova to her starved bodiless senses. Like breathing again. Bright and beautiful and innocent of its own power, a thing of wonder.

Now he's a human being seen by another human being. Without the Force, even. Often when she looks at him with her now-grey eyes he seems flat, like a poorly done painting. She wants to reach out, seek depth rendering and resolution. Seek the numbers beneath the lines. Dig her fingers into his skin to find the data beneath.

He looks at her and the muscles around his mouth expand and contact, curving his lips. She remembers to see it as a smile. He speaks of marriage and children and Callista cancels the impulse to shudder. Would he treasure children who look at him with the eyes of dead Cray?

He seems to forget this was Cray once. Seems to wish it that way. Easy for him. He is not trapped fast within the confines of alien skin, mind still holding the shape of space and the echo of vacuum against outer hull. He is not burdened with teeth that are the wrong shape and hands that hold the mannerisms of someone else, a brain moulded to another life, a mouth that speaks words with the wrong accent. Fingerprints that are arches, forming no backward turn.

Bile rises in her throat, another sodden bodily betrayal.

She watches the sun rise, breathes nitrogen and oxygen, and wonders listlessly what would happen if she were to peel back the skin she wears somehow. Would her existence end without the Force? Would she linger on in some bodiless, formless way, a spirit among the remnants of the Sith in Luke's tainted temples?

Luke's awake when she returns to their room. He says nothing as she crawls over, as she clings to him, breathing the warmth of his bare skin. Her mind skitters down old lines, expecting sensors to give a precise reading on temperature.

"What can I do?" he asks, sounding helpless. He sounds helpless often, and deals with confrontation by becoming remote. His voice is modulated sound filtered through cilia to nerve endings and it assaults her brain as noise.

She huddles close. Geith held her this way, stupid, ignorant Geith, Geith who she died for. Geith who betrayed her. Geith from whom she betrayed herself. The irony cuts like a blade and she snorts a laugh that is Cray's laugh, Cray's laugh through Cray's full lips.

"Nothing," she answers. "Nothing."

Luke thinks if he searches hard enough he will find a way to bring the Force back to her. He tries to find explanation for what she lost and why.

Callista doesn't wonder. She left the computer, but the computer did not leave her. The machine is within her now, part of her soul. She is not human anymore. She never will be again. Something is changed.

Cray loved a man so much she put him in a machine. Luke's done the opposite.

Callista's fingers curl around his bicep hard enough to hurt, but he doesn't say a word.

Callista wonders if someday she'll be lucky enough to die.

-end-


End file.
